Rabindranath Tagore Quotes
We sit inert, like dead specimens of some museum, while lessons are pelted at us from on high, like hailstones on flowers.
Tagore, Rabindranath. Personality. Macmillan, 1917, p. 115.
This quotation is fascinating but sad. In 1902, Aga Kahn III and other Muslim reformers gathered to improve the terrible state of Muslim education. Muslims could attend the English operated public schools which were excellent, but the Imams fought these schools as they were purely secular and not under their control. Yet the Madrassas religious schools that then existed taught by rote and only Islamic religious content—no mathematics, science, other literature, art or anything else. Much of the teaching was religiously extreme with not even modern religious content. Over a century later the Schools of Pakistan—the Islamic nation carved out of India and those of most of the Arab nations are little better and despite a century of progress, the curriculum is the same.
The companies that pay well usually compete for highly talented people who want more than a good salary to move to a particular community.
Rabindranath Tagore FRAS was a Bengali poet, writer, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. He reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse" of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European as well as the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal. He is sometimes referred to as "the Bard of Bengal".
